Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Monday, May 18, 2015

The EPA Myth of "Clean Power"

By Alan
Caruba

There are
many things I do not like about the Environmental Protection Agency, but what
angers me most are the lies that stream forth from it to justify programs that
have no basis in fact or science and which threaten the economy.

Currently,
its “Clean Power” plan is generating its latest and most duplicitous
Administer, Gina McCarthy, to go around saying that it will not be costly, nor
cost jobs. “Clean Power” is the name given to the EPA policy to reduce overall
U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030. It is
requiring each state to cut its emissions by varying amounts using a baseline
established by the EPA.

Simply
said, there is no need whatever to reduce CO2 emissions. Carbon dioxide is not
“a pollutant” as the EPA claims. It is, along with oxygen for all living
creatures, vital to the growth of all vegetation. The more CO2 the better crops
yields will occur, healthier forests, and greener lawns. From a purely
scientific point of view, it is absurd to reduce emissions.

Writing in
The Wall Street Journal on April 22, Kenneth C. Hill, Director of the Tennessee
Regulatory Authority, said “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) set
off a firestorm when he advised states not to comply with the Environmental
Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan. Yet that advice isn’t as radical as his
detractors make it sound. As a state public utilities commissioner who deals
with the effects of federal regulations on a regular basis, I also recommend
that states not comply.”

Noting its
final due date in June, that refusal would impose a Federal Implementation Plan
on states “that risks even greater harm,” said Hill. “But the problem for the
EPA is that the federal government lacks the legal authority under either the
Constitution or the Clean Air Act to enforce most of the regulation’s ‘building
blocks’ without states’ acquiescence.”

As this is
being written there is are two joined cases before the DC Circuit Court of
Appeals, State of West Virginia v EPA and
Murray Energy v EPA. They are a
challenge to President Obama’s “War on Coal” and the EPA efforts to regulate
its use. Fifteen states, along with select coal companies, have sued for an
“extraordinary whit” to prevent the EPA from promulgating the new carbon
regulations found it the Clean Power plan.

Writing in
The Hill, Richard O. Faulk, an
attorney and senior director for Energy Natural Resources and the Environment
for the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University, noted that “The
EPA’s argument confidently hinges on convincing the courts that the Clean Air
Act doesn’t mean what it says. By its plain language, the bill prohibits the EPA from regulating the
power plants from which these emissions derive. Moreover, coal plants are
already addressed under an entirely different section of the bill than the one
EPA insists justifies its powers.”

The latest
news as reported by Myron Ebell, the director for energy and environment of the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, is that “Senator
Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) this week introduced a bill to block
the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules to regulate greenhouse gas
emissions from new and existing power plants. S. 1324, the Affordable Reliable Energy Now
Act, has 26 original co-sponsors, including Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee Chairman
James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), and Democrat Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).”

“Both
Majority Leader McConnell and Chairman Inhofe have said that they are
determined to stop EPA’s greenhouse gas rules, so I expect quick action to move
Capito’s bill. In the House, a bill to block the rules, H. R. 2042, the Ratepayer Protection Act, was
voted out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on 29th April and is
awaiting floor action.”

It’s worth
noting that, when Obama took office, fifty percent of America’s electrical
energy was supplied by coal-fired plants and, just six years later, that has
been reduced by ten percent. What kind of President would deliberately reduce
American’s access to affordable power?

It’s the
same kind of President that believes—or says he does—the pronouncements of the
U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s “Climate Change
2014 Synthesis Report” claims that world will face “severe, pervasive and
irreversible damage” if coal-fired and other carbon-based—coal, oil, and
natural gas—energy sources aren’t replaced with “renewable energy sources”—wind
and solar—by 2050. It wants fossil-fueled power generation “phased out almost
entirely by 2100.”Now this is just
insanity, unless your agenda is to destroy the world’s economic system and kill
millions. That would be the only outcome of the IPCC recommendations.

The
columnist Larry Bell, a professor at the University of Houston, points out that
“As for expecting renewables to fill in the power curve, European Union
experiences offer a painful reality check. Approximately 7.8 percent of
Germany’s electricity comes from wind, 4.5 percent from solar. Large as a
result, German households already fork out for the second highest power costs
in Europe—often as much as 30 percent above the levels seen in other European
countries. Power interruptions add to buyer’s remorse.”

As
reported in The Heartland Institute’s Environment & Climate News“European governments, once at the vanguard of renewable
energy mandates, appear to be having second thoughts about their reliance on
giant wind farms…” There has been a sharp drop in such projects with
installations plunging 90% in Denmark, 75% in Italy, and 84% in Spain.

What the
EPA is attempting to impose on America is a drain on our production of
electricity coupled with an increase in its price. It is an obscene attack on
our economy.

“Progressives” have long held the Declaration of Independence as legally unfettered from their view of a “living, breathing Constitution.” They commonly vilify the critical “endowment by our Creator.” There’s more to the moral, spiritual and philosophical basis of the Constitution than defining “inalienable rights.” In the Declaration there is also the chronicled history of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:”

These direct quotes from the Declaration of Independence need no further explanation.• He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good (energy and monetary policy to destroy our economy and enrich his cronies and our enemies.). • He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance (illegal immigration, maintaining the peace), unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. • He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly (bypassing Congress by Executive Orders, overturning initiatives voted overwhelmingly by the people – immigration policy, marriage under natural law between a man and woman.), for opposing with ‘manly’ firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. • He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within (Occupy anarchism, union thuggery, failure to enforce the borders, establishing a ‘civilian defense force as strong and well-funded as the military’).. • He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands (Removing lands from resource exploration and development, draconian EPA and development regulations, minimum and prevailing wage demands to eliminate competition and compromise free enterprise). • He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers (Appointing judges who have disdain for the Constitution, even though they solemnly swear to uphold it – in league with all too many elected and bureaucratic officials.). • He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance (Obamacare with its 159 new agencies and selective privileges in green, health, education, welfare and union venues).• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation: (Conspiring with international financial speculators and passing laws so complicated and indiscernible that they are loaded with special privileges, poison pills and bureaucratic license such as that being used to attack businesses, citizens, Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular No law should exceed one specific subject area or 100 pages in length, or it is by definition, pretended legislation.)By applying Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Cloward and Pivens strategies, the Administration and its cronies are overwhelming the system with harassment, untenable regulations, creating dependency by a large segment of the population through ignorance of our laws, traditions and history and usurping the parental role and responsibility for raising children in favor of the state.

Thanks Dan There are three sites - actually many more where the truth is being exposed over the lies of the "progressives" and internationalists.www.webcommentary.comwww.principia-scientific.orghttp://www.newsmax.com/Insiders/LarryBell/id-228/ It's all about a one world government - not a global economy. They never learn.

Thank you Dan and wildvortex. I don't use my name here on Blogger and like it that way. I email Mr. Caruba every now and then if I really like something he posts. I spend most of my time on G+ and sometimes link his posts on that service. Not sure if the comments can be linked but no matter.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.